CHAPTER 3 – Welcome to the Survival Game

For a moment, we just stared at each other.

Me: barefoot, shaking, heart trying to beat out of my chest.

Him: unmoving, like a statue someone had carved out of shadow and sharp lines, only his eyes alive, reflecting that strange red-gold light.

His grip on my arms was firm but not bruising. When I tried to jerk back, his fingers tightened just enough to remind me I wasn’t going anywhere until he decided to let me.

“Let go,” I managed, breathless.

He blinked once, lazily, like a cat interrupted mid-nap, and then his gaze dropped to where his hand wrapped around my wrist.

Long, pale fingers. Veins like faint ink lines under skin. His thumb rested right over my pulse.

It was pounding like a trapped bird.

He watched it for a heartbeat.

Two.

Then his thumb pressed down very slightly, as if confirming I was really there.

Alive.

Or whatever this was.

Slowly, he released me.

The sudden lack of contact made me sway. I grabbed the nearest seatback to steady myself and forced myself to look away from his face. It felt like trying to tear my eyes away from an oncoming train.

Get a grip, Willa.

I dragged in a breath and made myself see the rest of the bus.

It was… wrong.

Rows of cracked vinyl seats, some with chunks of foam missing. Metal poles streaked with rust. The windows were smeared and fogged from the inside, making the outside world nothing but a white blur. The overhead lights were dim, more like an afterthought than actual illumination.

There was no driver.

Where the driver’s seat should’ve been was just a shadowed shape behind a greasy plastic partition. There is no outline of a person. No movement.

Passengers sat scattered through the bus.

“Sat” might’ve been generous. They slumped. Curled. Hung on to the seat in front of them like they were bracing for impact that never came.

A woman in a stained office blouse stared at her hands, knuckles white. A man in a mechanic’s jumpsuit had his head tipped back, eyes closed, lips moving silently. An older lady with iron-gray hair and sharp cheekbones sat near the middle, spine straight, gaze forward—too alert. A cluster of teenagers huddled near the back, whispering.

Their eyes were wrong, too. Not glowing. Just… dull. Hollow. Like the color had been sucked out of them.

My skin crawled.

Someone shifted on the left. A guy maybe a few years younger than me, in a college hoodie, gave me a quick, nervous “hey,” like we were on a normal night bus, and I’d just stumbled.

I opened my mouth, not sure what to say, when a chill slid over the side of my face.

Not a touch. A look.

I didn’t have to see him to feel it.

The dark-haired man who’d caught me—my personal grim reaper with the unfair bone structure—turned his head a fraction.

His gaze brushed over the younger guy.

Flat. Dangerous. Disinterested, like he was evaluating a bug on the seat.

The other man’s throat bobbed. He shut his mouth and snapped his eyes forward, hands tightening on his backpack straps.

Okay then.

Predator, meet prey.

My stomach knotted.

I backed up a step until the backs of my knees hit an empty seat. I sat down hard, fingers locking around the cracked vinyl as if the bus would drop me back into the fog if I let go.

The dark man—whatever he was—didn’t follow. He simply turned away, braced one hand casually on the pole near the front, and his body relaxed in a way that screamed control.

The air shook with a loud, old-fashioned crackle.

An intercom.

A speaker above my head spit static, then a voice slid through—too loud, too smooth, and far too amused.

[WELCOME TO THE SURVIVAL GAME]

I flinched. A few of the other passengers did, too. The older woman in the middle just closed her eyes briefly, like she’d heard this before.

[CONGRATULATIONS,] the voice went on, [YOU ARE ALL DEAD.]

Silence slammed through the bus like a second impact.

Dead.

I stared at the grimy floor. At my perfectly intact feet. At my unbroken hands.

No. No, no, no—

“Cute,” the college boy muttered under his breath, voice shaking. “Real funny.”

The intercom laughed. A warped, metallic chuckle.

[HELL IS IN RECYCLE MODE] it purred. [YOU WILL ENTER DEAD WORLDS FOR THE AUDIENCE’S ENTERTAINMENT.]

My throat felt dry.

Dead worlds.

Audience.

“Entertain—” My voice cracked.

[PLEASE DIE BEAUTIFULLY,] the intercom finished, delighted.

A few of the teenagers in the back started sobbing, ugly, hiccuping sounds. One of them swore, voice cracking. “This is bullshit. It’s a prank. Some, some twisted—”

The bus didn’t care.

I couldn’t breathe.

Dead.

I saw the car again. The headlights. The impact.

I pressed my hand hard against my sternum, half-expecting to feel a crater. There was nothing. Just the frantic rise and fall of my own chest.

“This isn’t funny,” I said, louder. “If this is some… some experimental therapy, or a YouTube social experiment—”

No camera. No crew. No exit door but the one that led back out into the white nothing.

Grief, shock, fury, sheer *ridiculousness* of it all welled up at once.

“I just died,” I snapped up at the speaker. “I just watched my boyfriend—ex—whatever—the asshole who stole five years of my life—screw my sister in my bed. I got hit by a car. And now you want me to be—what? A contestant? A joke? Entertainment?”

Someone a few rows up snorted. “She’s loud.”

“Loud” was better than invisible, but the word still made my skin prickle.

Before I could whirl on them, the dark man by the pole spoke for the first time since he’d caught me.

“She’s alive,” he said, voice low, almost bored. “That’s more than you can say.”

The mocking passenger shut up.

The words shouldn’t have mattered, but they did. It wasn’t praise, not really, but it was the first time anyone had put me on the side of **alive** in… a while.

I hated that a little spark of something—relief?—flared in my chest at the sound of his voice.

The intercom crackled again, cheerfully oblivious to my meltdown.

[WELCOME PACKAGE COMPLETE] it chimed. [IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS, PLEASE DIRECT THEM TO—]

Static hissed. A mechanical cough.

[NO ONE.]

Laughter, canned and hollow, echoed as if from some unseen studio.

My hands clenched on the seat until my knuckles ached.

“No,” I said. “No. I am not—no way in hell am I just going to sit here and be… watched.”

My voice rose with each word. “I didn’t work myself into the ground, I didn’t give up everything for a man who cheated on me with my own sister, I didn’t get smeared across the road so I could come here and be some sick audience’s little—little *toy.*”

A muscle ticked in the dark man’s jaw. His eyes slid back to me, curious now.

I shot to my feet, half-sobbing, half-laughing, hysterical. “What if I refuse? Huh? What if I say no? You can’t make me play your stupid—”

“What if I refuse to play?” I demanded, glaring up at the speaker.

The intercom went briefly quiet, as if considering this.

The dark man finally turned his body fully toward me.

His gaze pinned me in place. The bus felt suddenly too small, the air too thin.

When he spoke, his voice rolled through the bus like a calm threat.

“Then you die,” he said.

I stared at him. “I thought I already did.”

“You did,” he agreed. “You just did it wrong.”

He took a step closer, not looming, but there was no mistaking the predator in the way he moved—controlled, economical, like he never wasted energy. Up close, I could see faint, old scars along his knuckles, pale lines on pale skin.

“Not by my hands,” he added, as if that mattered. “The worlds don’t like cowards. Opting out just gets you erased faster.”

Erased.

Not passed on. It's not reincarnated.

Just… gone.

My knees went wobbly. I sank back onto the seat.

“So my choices are what?” I whispered. “Dance for your invisible audience until they get bored and kill me… or sit here and let the worlds erase me?”

“Roughly.” He watched me with unnerving stillness. “At least the first option gives you something to do.”

“Why are you so calm?” My voice cracked on the question. “Is this normal to you? Dragging people onto haunted buses and telling them to ‘die beautifully’?”

For a heartbeat, something old and tired flickered in his eyes.

“Normal,” he said. “No.” Then, after a pause, “Familiar.”

The word dropped like a stone.

I opened my mouth to ask what that meant, but the bus gave a lurch under my feet.

The lights flickered brighter for a second, then dimmed.

At the front, above the suggestion of a driver’s seat, a dead black rectangle blinked to life.

Green digital letters scrolled across it, flickering in and out:

[NEXT STATION: DRACULA CASTLE]

My stomach dropped.

“Of course,” I muttered. “Of course it’s Dracula Castle.”

As I stared, a new sensation prickled against my left hand. A sharp, sudden burn.

I hissed and lifted my hand.

My ring finger—bare since the day Ethan said an engagement ring was “too much pressure”—was banded by a faint red line. Not ink. Not a cut. A ring of light, just under the skin, glowing like a tiny ember.

“What—” My throat tightened.

The sensation was equal parts heat and shame. Like the Game itself was circling the place where I’d once believed so hard in the wrong man that I’d practically carved his name there.

The dark man’s gaze dropped to my hand.

For a split second, his expression changed.

Something like recognition. And pity. And anger that didn’t belong to me.

Then it was gone. His face smoothed over into its cold, unreadable mask.

He looked away.

The intercom crackled one last time, almost purring.

[ROUND ONE APPROACHING,] it said. [PLEASE DIE BEAUTIFULLY]

The bus groaned and plunged forward into the white.